XXXVITRUFFAUT’S FAHRENHEIT 451: A WORLD WITHOUT BOOKS

Robert Murphy

“It wasn’t planned. It just so happened that a man here and there loved some book and rather than lose it he learnt it and we came together. We’re a minority of undesirables, crying out in the wilderness. But it won’t always be so. One day we shall be called on, one by one, to recite what we’ve learnt and then books will be printed again. And when the next age of darkness comes, people who come after us will again do as we have done.”1

Truffaut is a director haunted by memories. In contrast to Godard, whose films grapple relentlessly with the meaning of the present, Truffaut’s films have a yearning quality that can be mistaken for nostalgia. Fahrenheit 451 (1966) disappointed critics and failed to woo audiences, partly because it played down the science fiction elements of Ray Bradbury’s apocalyptic novel, partly because it failed to mix in a convincing love story. Though the film, Truffaut’s first in colour, is visually satisfying, its main concern is not with the future, the external world, the love between men and women, but with the love of books and their capacity to evoke the past.

Truffaut first came across Fahrenheit 451 at a dinner party in Paris in August 1960. Producer Raoul Levy recounted the story and fascinated Truffaut with Bradbury’s vision of a future where books are hunted down and burnt in order to eradicate the past and force people to live entirely in the present.2 After Tirez sur le pianiste (1960) and Jules et Jim (1962), Truffaut planned to make Fahrenheit 451 as his next film, but difficulties arose over funding and casting. Truffaut enjoyed international prestige for Les quatre cents coups (1959) and Jules et Jim, but filming Fahrenheit 451, particularly if it was to be done in colour and in English, would involve a significantly bigger budget and might necessitate the involvement of Hollywood stars. The project shuttled between America, where Truffaut worried about retaining artistic control, and France, where producers worried about recouping their costs.3 Truffaut didn’t make matters easy for himself by insisting on

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an idiosyncratic interpretation of Bradbury’s tale, which played down the futuristic/science fiction elements. As he later confessed: “the adaptation we wrote, Jean-Louis Richard and I, never aroused much enthusiasm except among three or four of our pals”.4 Eventually the independent American producer Lewis Allen persuaded MCA/Universal that, with the willing participation of Oskar Werner and Julie Christie, both of whom were contenders for Oscars in 1966, the film should be part of the British production programme they were setting up in “Swinging London”, and production began at Pinewood studios in January 1966.

Fahrenheit 451 proved to be a troubled production. Ironically, in view of his suggestion to Hitchcock four years earlier that there that was something incompatible between Britain and cinema, Truffaut had nothing but praise for his British technicians, who quickly became loyally protective of their French “Guv’nor”.5 The contribution of his French-speaking cinematographer Nicolas Roeg proved invaluable in giving Truffaut’s first colour film a distinctive look, and, though there were several disagreements, the choice of Bernard Hermann to write the score was vindicated by music which adds a lyrical resonance to the film. The fly in the ointment proved to be Oskar Werner, the Austrian actor who had worked so productively with Truffaut on Jules et Jim. Terence Stamp had been cast as Montag, the fireman who learns to love books, but the ever-sensitive Stamp worried about being over-shadowed by his former girlfriend Julie Christie when Truffaut and Lewis Allen decided to offer her both the female lead parts, and he withdrew at the last moment. Werner, who was to play the supporting role of the Fire Captain, agreed to step into the breach. Things started to go wrong very quickly over how Montag should be played; their deteriorating relationship is charted in the diary Truffaut wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma, published in three instalments throughout 1966.6 When the film was released in the early months of 1967, it was generally regarded as a failure. Truffaut, demoralised by his long exile in London, told Nicolas Roeg that it must have been a bad film because nobody went to see it.7 But as Truffaut’s only English-language film, it continued to attract attention and its release on DVD in 2003, with revealing commentaries by Julie Christie, Thom Noble, Lewis Allen, Steven C. Smith and Annette Insdorf, short documentaries about the making of the film and Bernard Hermann’s score, and an interview with Ray Bradbury, has provoked favourable reassessment.8

THE ERASURE OF THE PAST

Early in the film, Montag comes home from work and is surprised that Linda, his wife, isn’t in her habitual place in front of the wall-panel television. He finds her comatose on the bathroom floor and rings

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the emergency services. Two cheerful paramedics in white plastic uniforms are soon on the scene and they reassure him that there is nothing to worry about: a quick blood change and she will be as good as new in the morning. Sure enough, when Montag wakes it is to the sound of a bath running and he finds his wife happy and ravenously hungry. Her new blood also seems to have worked wonders with her lIbido, and using a judo move she has learnt from the television, she trips him onto the bed and makes love to him. Montag is relieved at her miraculous recovery but he is bemused and disturbed by her unwillingness or inability to remember anything about the night before and her near-death experience.

Linda is irritatingly empty-headed, but as played by Julie Christie she is also warm, affectionate and likeable. What is most unsatisfactory about her is her one-dimensionality. She seemingly has no past. She buys Montag a gift but she can’t remember why she bought it (it was to celebrate his expected promotion); when Montag asks her how and when they first met, she can’t remember. This erasure of the past makes her vulnerable: with no sense of her own history she has no resources to draw on to cope with any disturbance in the present. When we first see her she is enthusiastically excited about a television participation show where one of the characters turns to address the audience and asks, “What do you think, Linda?” Montag points out that there will be millions of Lindas playing the game, and she is deeply hurt: “It’s not true. And even if it were true, you didn’t have to tell me. That was very mean, Montag”. She is even more appalled when he upsets her friends by insisting on reading them Dickens’s description of the decline and death of Dora Copperfield and bringing books into the house without even bothering to hide them properly. When she moves a picture and finds a book behind it she reacts as if she has seen a giant cockroach lurking there.

Linda’s fear of books is unthinking and emotional. Her fear is sufficient for her to betray Montag and leave him, so within the anti-authority resistance framework of the film that becomes increasingly evident, she is on the wrong side. But she is not bad or unlikeable. She is the model citizen—docile and conformist—a victim rather than a perpetrator, and being nasty to her is like kicking a puppy. Montag’s more formidable antagonist is the Fire Captain played by Cyril Cusack. He is the exact opposite of Linda: she is warm and emotional, he is cold and rational; she is afraid of books, he is fascinated by them. Though his motivation is obscure, he acts with the zeal of a convert: a book-lover who has had a road to Damascus revelation and believes that all books are bad. When he discovers the Book Woman’s hidden library, he bubbles over with glee and forces Montag to listen to his diatribe about why books have to be destroyed: “It’s no good Montag, we all have to be alike; the only way to be happy is for everyone to be made equal”. He explains

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that books are bad because they present contradictory views of the world and confuse people. They make people discontented with their lives by showing them exciting and dangerous alternatives. They make people solitary and unhappy and anti-social. Because of this, it is not enough selectively to pick out particular books to be burnt. Books per se are evil and wrong and have to be exterminated. As he tells Montag, holding up a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, “We must burn the books, Montag. All the books”.

BOOKS ARE My FRIENDS

Ray Bradbury had declined the offer to adapt his novel for the screen but was pleased with what Truffaut had achieved and became a stalwart defender of the film. One of the things he objected to, however, was the change to the character of Clarisse, the girl who provokes Montag into questioning his unthinking destruction of books. Bradbury’s Clarisse is a sixteen-year-old wise child, so strange and different that Montag has to shift his view of the world to make sense of her. She disappears early in the novel and her place is taken by Faber, an elderly academic who guides Montag in his rebellion and tells him how to escape to join the Book People. In the film Clarisse is played by Julie Christie, complementing her role as Linda, as a seemingly naïve free spirit.9 Christie thought her performance shallow in hindsight, and like Truffaut preferred the “conventional but moving” Linda to the “pseudo-poetical” Clarisse.10 But things are a little more complex.

Clarisse presents herself as gauche and ineffectual—“twenty years old and light in the head”—but she also appears to be manipulating Montag, stalking him and contriving a meeting, cajoling him to come to the school with her and drawing on his sympathy. We see her accompanying the Book Lady, and we realise that it is her voice on the phone warning the young man in the opening sequence of the film that the firemen are on their way. After Montag proves his commitment by finding and destroying the lists of names, she reveals that their first meeting was not an accident. When they part, her brusque assertion that they won’t meet again and there is no point pretending that they will shows an unsuspected decisiveness, and her changed behaviour once she has gone on the run suggests that her daffiness is an act. Her inconsistencies don’t quite gel into a coherent character, but the confusing signals she sends out help make her relationship with Montag something other than a romantic one.

Truffaut claimed to have “de-sexed” Clarisse, making Christie look boyish and unglamorous, and he did his utmost to restrain Werner from introducing gestures of affection and romance. George Bluestone, in his essay “The Fire and the Future”, still the most intelligent and

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perceptive analysis of Fahrenheit 451, argues that “Truffaut wanted Clarisse to be Ariel, leading Montag to renounce the destructive fire and so bring him to redemption. Werner wanted his Juliet. Truffaut wanted a symbol. Werner wanted a woman”.11 Bluestone thinks Truffaut was wrong and that the coolness of the relationship between Montag and Clarisse damages the film. But Truffaut’s determination that Montag should be transformed by his love affair with books rather than by love for another woman was surely right. It allows his relationship with his wife to retain a degree of pathos—he seems genuinely alarmed at her overdose, pained and angry at her increasing zombification, and upset and disturbed when he realises she is leaving him—and keeps the central focus of the film on Montag’s discovery of reading.12 Linda makes him choose not between herself and Clarisse but between herself and books.

Clarisse’s function is not to tempt Montag away from his wife or even (as he at one point proposes) to act as a book-loving mole subverting the credibility of his fellow firemen, but to inspire in him a curiosity about the books he burns. It is an intellectual upheaval she induces in him, not a sexual one; apart from his sly remark that his wife looks rather like her, and her impersonation of Linda when she phones the Fire Chief, Clarisse’s resemblance to Linda hardly figures. In a key sequence, Montag goes to work after his love-making with Linda and sees Clarisse on the monorail, but rather than talk to her, he recalls her question “Do you ever read the books you burn?” His conversion has begun. We then see Linda sat at her dressing table mirror fondling her breasts (narcissism is a recurring motif of the film); when Montag returns home, the automatic door refuses to open: technology is able to detect the change in his psyche.13 Linda lets him in and the first thing he does is to hide a book. In the middle of the night, he puts on a white dressing gown, retrieves the book, and by the light of the television screen, begins to read David Copperfield. It is as if he is reading for the first time, slowly enunciating each word on the title page, including the date and publisher before proceeding to Dickens’s opening lines “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life…”14 Montag proves a quick learner. A few days later, when he insists on reading the passage dealing with the death of Dora Copperfield to Linda and her friends, he does so with an emotional impact that reduces one of them to tears and the others to shocked outrage.

This sequence is an expanded echo of a much briefer scene in Les quatre cent coups (1959), where the rebellious truant Antoine Doinel reads the end of Honoré de Balzac’s short but powerful novel La Recherche de l’Absolu and relishes the grim irony of the deluded chemist, who has squandered his fortune and ruined the lives of his family in

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his search for the philosopher’s stone, dying at the moment when he thinks he has at last found it. Antoine builds a shrine to Balzac in his bedroom, which he accidentally sets on fire. But he remembers the story too well: what he hopes will be his prize-winning essay on the death of his grandfather reproduces La Recherche de l’Absolu so exactly that he is castigated for plagiarism.

Books were important to Truffaut. He differentiates between those people who love books purely for their contents and those who have a more visceral attachment:

…in someone whose early years were spent in the country or in a place where books were rare objects… the book exists almost completely apart from its contents and becomes a cult object. With time, its bindings, its jacket, even its smell take on a particular sentimental significance for the person who owns it.15

There is a fetishistic quality about the book-burning sequences in the film; indeed, it is difficult not to share the Fire Captain’s gleeful fascination as covers, pages, images gradually succumb to the flames. But the books are functional and utilitarian rather than beautiful artefacts. Like Bradbury, Truffaut was a man who had educated himself, and (apart from a book of Dali’s paintings) he insisted on displacing the glossy publications provided by the Pinewood props department with the sort of cheap paperbacks that had been his own entrée into reading. He was cheered to find that “right from the start of Fahrenheit 451 everybody on the unit has begun to read. There are often hundreds of books on the set; each member of the unit chooses one and sometimes you can hear nothing but the sound of turning pages”.16 Book culture might be under siege, but it is shown as robust and books as plentiful and disposable—after all, the Book People burn their books after memorising them—and Truffaut avoids the trap of sentimentalising them. In the end it is not the books but what they stand for that is important. Books are stored memories, repositories of knowledge. As Montag exasperatedly tries to explain to Linda: “Behind each of these books there is a man; that’s what interests me so.” Later he brushes aside her concern about him, telling her “I’ve got to read. I’ve got to catch up with the remembrance of the past”.

NOBODy FEELS ANy PAIN

Truffaut argued that Fahrenheit 451 was “a fable for our epoch”. But the epoch in which Bradbury had written his tale had changed irrevocably by the time the film came to be made. The novel was published in 1953 and incorporated short stories Bradbury had written even earlier. Bradbury’s is a grim world less than a decade

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distant from the mass slaughter of the Second World War. Written In the shadow of the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the escalating cold war with the Soviet Union, his novel gave expression to fears about the repression of dissent, the trivialisation of cultural life, the anomie and hedonism of the young, and the looming threat of nuclear Armageddon. The world in 1966 was a very different place. Senator McCarthy’s acolyte Richard Nixon had been defeated by Democrat John F Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election, and Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 failed to stall the Civil Rights movement that finally ended racial segregation. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 had come close to igniting nuclear war, but with the threat averted the future could be faced with greater optimism. The spread of mass culture, though still a matter of concern to intellectuals, had proved less pernicious than expected, as art cinema jostled into the mainstream and television found room to accommodate quality drama, investigative journalism and satirical comedy. The youth of the 60s showed a penchant for hedonism and disrespect for authority greater even than that of their 50s predecessors, but it was coupled with idealism and an ambition to create a better world. Truffaut, who entombed himself in the Hilton Hotel during his long sojourn in London during the making of the film, did his best to ignore “Swinging London”.17 But with its clean lines and bright colours, and Bernard Hermann’s string-based rhythmical score, which looks back to the English pastoral tradition rather than forward to an electronic future, his adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 is milder and more optimistic than Bradbury’s apocalyptic vision of the future.

Truffaut aimed “to film fantastic things as if they were everyday, everyday things as if they were fantastic, and to mingle one with another.”18 To this aim he dispenses with melodramatic devices and emotional identification and plays down the horrific elements of Bradbury’s dystopian society. The inexorable Mechanical Hound is nowhere to be seen, the wars which devour Linda’s friends’ husbands are given only cursory mention, and the nuclear holocaust which descends on society at the end of Bradbury’s story is avoided entirely. Truffaut’s is a much gentler world, with Hermann’s sensitive score adding notes of nostalgia. The firemen might look like Nazi stormtroopers, but there is no overt brutality and the persecuted victims escape easily. In the opening sequence a young man answers the phone, grabs his coat, takes a bite from an apple and makes a quick exit before the firemen, with almost ceremonial slowness, arrive to search his flat. A group of passers-by congregate to watch the burning of his books when they are tossed into the street below. A little boy steps forward, picks up a book and starts leafing through it. One of the firemen exchanges disapproving glances with the boy’s father, who takes the book (The Moon and Sixpence by Somerset Maugham) from the boy’s hands and

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tosses it back on the pile. The mood is one of sullen conformity. Later in the film the firemen descend on a recreation park. Motherly women are frisked; shopping carelessly rifled; the Captain impatiently stops a boy from embracing himself. More sinisterly, he searches a baby’s pram and finds a tiny book hidden there. He wags his finger at the baby as she tries to grab the book. It is not a friendly gesture, but neither is it very threatening. The final incident involves Montag and a shabby middle-aged man. A wipe blocks off half the screen, reinforcing the impression of entrapment but also of collusion. The man is obviously concealing books; but Montag, after his night-time reading session, has switched sides and he does nothing to detain him.

Horror rears its head with the burning to death of the Book Woman, who stands amidst a heap of her books and sets them alight. But the attitude of the firemen is one of impatience and irritability rather than sadistic brutality. She is ignored, pushed aside, not listened to, but they are taken aback and indecisive in the face of her bewildered defiance. Truffaut deliberately selected Bee Duffell to play his martyr, because she was “small and round, a bit comical, to go against the convention of the dignified valiant lady with the beautiful ravaged face”.19 Her poignant repetition of Bishop Latimer’s words to Bishop Ridley as they burned at the stake in 1555, “Play the man, Master Ridley, we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, as I trust shall never be put out”, is resonant in linking her to a tradition of dissent. But unlike Ridley, who burnt very slowly and painfully despite his brother-in-law heaping more faggots onto the fire, she hardly seems to suffer. The Captain’s death, set ablaze when Montag turns the flamethrower on him, is more graphic and less lyrical, but he seems more surprised than agonised; hurt more by Montag’s rejection than by the flames.

THE ART OF MEMORy

Linda—driven to desperation by the books Montag insists on bringing into their home—informs on him. On what he expects to be a routine book-burning call, Montag finds that the target is his own house. The Captain hands him the flamethrower and orders him to burn his books. Instead he turns the flames on his marital bed and the wall-panel television. Goaded by the Captain, he does start to burn books, but then directs the flamethrower on his persecutor. In the resulting confusion, Montag escapes and joins the Book People who live in the woods beyond the end of the railway line. He finds that Clarisse is already there, and has memorised her chosen volume, The Memoirs of Saint-Simon; Montag chooses Edgar Alan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination as the book he will “become”.

Several critics took against the Book People. George Bluestone found them lacking in spontaneity and invention, and “all too sad”;

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Nina Hibbin (writing in the Communist Morning Star) called them “a fey and Hampsteady lot”; Dilys Powell, the Sunday Times critic, was reminded of “some hideous get-together party game into which one was trapped before one had learned to take a stand against togetherness”.20 But realism was not a priority for Truffaut in Fahrenheit 451. Hardly twenty years after the end of the Second World War, he could have easily drawn on memories of the Maquis, the bands of resistance fighters based in the mountains and woodlands of France. But his gentle international community of talking books were no more meant to be a guerrilla army than the hippie partisans who appear at the end of Godard’s Weekend (1967).

Annette Insdorf complains that “The individual who has become Wuthering Heights or Alice in Wonderland may not necessarily be less of an automaton than the ‘cousins’ who watch television”.21 But this is patently not so. The Book People are bright, observant, friendly; even the semi-comic ones Montag is introduced to in the woods eagerly emerge from their self-absorption to greet him. By contrast, those in authority are patronising, arrogant and bullying. The “ordinary people” who gather round to watch a book-burning and suffer the harassment of the firemen in the park, look sullen and cowed, the monorail passengers narcissistically self-absorbed, Linda and her friends querulous, childish and fearful. Their behaviour can be seen as a pathetic, enfeebled yearning for community, a familiar enough reality in the totalitarian societies that Bradbury and Truffaut as maverick individualists both feared. The Book People, on the other hand, attempt to create a dedicated but friendly society, not unlike a medieval monastic community committed to preserving the heritage of the past.

Pauline Kael hones in on the Book People’s lack of creativity: “They have no concept of carrying on a living literary tradition, of writing books, or of using books for knowledge or even against the state, but of turning themselves into books—as in a kid’s game”.22 But Kael’s simple-minded condemnation underestimates the feat of memorising books. There is a nice symmetry that in the same year that Truffaut made Fahrenheit 451, Frances yates published her seminal book on Renaissance and pre-Renaissance memory systems, The Art of Memory.23 She reminds her readers that the Greeks had invented an art of memory which relied upon the creation of elaborate systems, utilising words, places, images, to remember speeches, poems, and legal documents. By the time of the Renaissance, when artificial memory systems enjoyed a remarkable recrudescence, whole books were being committed to memory. The seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci used his mnemonic skills to impress his sophisticated Chinese hosts, winning their admiration by instructing them in how they too could build a memory palace to store “the myriad concepts that make up the sum of our human knowledge”:

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He told them that the size of the palace would depend on how much they wanted to remember: the most ambitious construction would consist of several hundred buildings of all shapes and sizes. “The more there are the better it will be”, said Ricci, though he added that one did not have to build on a grandiose scale right away. One could create modest palaces, or one could build less dramatic structures such as a temple compound, a cluster of government offices, a public hostel, or a merchants’ meeting lodge. If one wished to begin on a still smaller scale, then one could erect a simple reception hall, a pavilion, or a studio, or an altar in a temple, or even such a homely object as a wardrobe or a divan... To everything that we wish to remember, wrote Ricci, we should give an image; and to every one of these images we should assign a position where it can repose peacefully until we are ready to reclaim it by an act of memory.24

Ricci was devout and orthodox; yates’s central figure is the alchemist Giordano Bruno, who was accused of sorcery and burnt at the stake in 1565. His artificial memory system went beyond memorising books to constructing an elaborate cosmology which (like Galileo’s) seemed to challenge Christian orthodoxy. For Bruno a complex and disciplined system of learning could unlock the mysteries of the universe.

Frances yates was based at the Warburg Institute, an obscure branch of London University hermetically closed to fashionable intellectual currents, and she was as immune as Truffaut was to the libertarian trends of Swinging London. Truffaut had no interest in permissive youth culture, despite his own maverick childhood, and in L’Enfant Sauvage (1970) cast himself as the Enlightenment disciplinarian Dr Itard, who takes it on himself to educate Victor, the wild boy from the woods. Itard’s motives are kindly but his methods sometimes cruel. He only grudgingly allows Victor his simple animal-like pleasures and expends all his ingenuity in devising techniques to draw him into the prison house of language.

Truffaut’s Book People are more jokey than Bradbury’s and he demonstrates his own loose, irreverent attitude to the literature of the past by adding a sentence to the end of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Weir of Hermiston—“And he died as he said he would, when the first snows of winter fell”—to fit the snowbound imagery with which the film ends. But the Book People retain their earnest function of preserving the knowledge of the past. As Julie Christie puts it in the DVD commentary, ‘What we have here is a society which has rekindled it’s power of memory”. Truffaut prepares the ground in two sequences that have no origins in Bradbury’s novel. When Clarisse and Montag go back to the school she taught at, we hear the children reciting their nine times table, going beyond the normal stopping point of nine times twelve equals one hundred and eight right up to nine times nineteen.

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It is an odd sequence, the pathos of Clarisse being rejected by her small pupils being undercut by the black humour of the pantomime headmistress played by Anton Diffring in drag (doubling up on his role as Montag’s jealous rival Fabian).

Learning by rote might be a symptom of the mechanical coldness of the new society; but Mary Carruthers in The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture makes a positive reassessment of this despised method of learning. She points out that rote learning was an essential precondition for the mnemonic feats performed by Ricci, Bruno and other adepts, and was an essential part of Medieval and Renaissance culture.25 Truffaut’s second sequence is less ambivalent than the first: here it is the brave little Book Woman with the secret library who recites the nine times table, striking the fatal match which causes her self-immolation when she reaches nine times fifteen equals one hundred and thirty-five.

Since the development of the personal computer and the internet, books as physical objects have begun to diminish in importance with the increasing trend to read books on electronic devices such as Kindle and the growing reliance on internet sources for information once only available in books. But it has also revived interest in mnemonic techniques (essential for making and breaking computer codes). As Bradbury and Truffaut foretold, we can live in a world without books as long as we are able to recall what they have to say to us.

NOTES

1. The leader of the Book People (Alex Scott) in Fahrenheit 451 (1966).2. See Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography (New

york: Knopf, 1999), 190 for Truffaut and Levy.3. Early choices for the central role of Montag included Paul Newman,

Jean-Paul Belmondo, Charles Aznavour, and Terence Stamp.4. Francois Truffaut, “Journal of ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ Part One”, trans. Kay

Mander and R. K. Neilson Baxter, Cahiers du Cinema in English, n. 5, 1966, 11 January.

5. “ I have never had so loyal a crew, showing me such kindness and so eager to please me as I have here at Pinewood”. “Journal of ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ Part One”, 22 January 1966; also Part Two, 9 March 1966: “ I have never worked with a unit who want so much to please me. I am becoming very anglophile, even if not very anglophone!”

6. Published in French and in Cahiers du Cinema in English in June and December 1966 and January 1967. See also my “Truffaut in London” in Lucy Mazdon and Catherine Wheatley, eds., Je t’aime... moi non plus: Franco-British Cinematic Relations (London: Berghahn Books, 2010). Since Jules et Jim, Werner had enhanced his international reputation with impressive performances in

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The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Martin Ritt, 1965) and Ship of Fools (Stanley Kramer, 1965), and he was no longer content simply to follow Truffaut’s instructions.

7. “Looking at the Rubber Duck: Nicolas Roeg talks to Richard Combs about working on François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451”, Sight and Sound, Winter 1984/5, 44.

8. Fahrenheit 451 Universal Pictures UK DVD release 2003. See also Tom Whalen’s essay, “The Consequences of Passivity: Re-evaluating Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451”, Literature Film Quarterly, July 2007, 181–90.

9. There were practical reasons for asking Christie to play both parts, as neither Clarisse nor Linda were on their own considered substantial enough for an actress emerging as a major star. She had first attracted attention in the BBC television science fiction drama A for Andromeda (1961), where she plays both the blonde android at the centre of the story and the brunette lab assistant who is murdered by the alien computer for her DNA.

10. “Journal of ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ Part Two”, 1 March. See also Christie’s commentary on the Universal DVD release of Fahrenheit 451.

11. George Bluestone, “The Fire and the Future”, Film Quarterly, Summer, 1967, 7.

12. “Journal of ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ Part Two”, 1 March.13. One could argue that technology simply detects the presence of

Montag’s illicit books, but there is something more subtle at work here, as evidenced by Montag’s inability to slide up the firepole after his conversion.

14. Whalen offers a detailed analysis of this sequence, “The Consequences of Passivity”, 185–87.

15. “A Fable of Our Epoch”, in Francois Truffaut, Truffaut by Truffaut, trans. R. E. Wolf (New york: Harry N. Abrams, 1987), 92.

16. “Journal of ‘Fahrenheit 451, Part Two”, 9 March.17. “In London, for Fahrenheit 451, I was like under punishment. I lived

for six months in the Hilton without having a meal outside my room. A car used to come to take me to the studio. When I got back to Paris, everyone said: ‘So London, a lot doing eh?’ I didn’t dare say, ‘I’ve only been in the Hilton’”. Truffaut by Truffaut, 40.

18. A Fable of Our Epoch”, 92.19. “Journal of ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ Part One”, 26 January.20. George Bluestone, “The Fire and the Future”, 6; Nina Hibbin, Morning

Star, 14 November 1966; Dilys Powell, Sunday Times, 20 November 1966.21. Annette Insdorf, François Truffaut (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2008, orig. pub. 1978), 78.22. Pauline Kael, ‘The Living Library: Fahrenheit 451’, in Kiss Kiss Bang

Bang (Boston/Toronto: Little, Brown, 1968), 148.23. Frances yates, The Art of Memory (London: Pimlico, 1992, first pub.

1966).24. Jonathan Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (London: Quercus,

2008, first pub. 1978), 1–2.

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25. Carruthers only realises this in 2008, when preparing a revised version of The Book of Memory (first published in 1990). In a strange echo of Fahrenheit 451, she tested the rote memorisation method set out by Hugh of St. Victor in 1135 by memorising psalms while commuting to work on the elevated train to Chicago. (New york: Cambridge University Press, 2008), xiii. Her achievements indicate that the efforts of the Book People to learn their books are entirely plausible!